The Armageddon Conspiracy (21 page)

Vernon shifted uneasily
in his seat.
He had little doubt Gresnick was right.
It was easy to
think of a modern example.
A teenage girl might write in her diary
that her new dress was
wicked
, her new boyfriend
hot
, and the new song by
her favourite group
bad
.
Someone discovering her diary two thousand years later might
conclude that she believed her dress was possessed by evil spirits,
her boyfriend had a fever, and she didn’t think her favourite
band’s latest tune was any good.
All of a sudden, it seemed mad to
Vernon that anyone could ever have believed that Jesus cured
lepers, restored sight to the blind, turned water into wine, walked
on water, raised Lazarus from the dead and all the rest of
it.

Vernon looked at the SAS troopers.
Most
of them had closed their eyes, but clearly weren’t sleeping.
A
couple of Welshmen in the corner were talking about rugby.
Vernon
breathed out hard.
At least his conversation with Gresnick had
taken his mind off the flight, but now he was feeling sick
again.

‘
A lot to think about,
huh?’
Gresnick raised his voice as the weather outside began to
worsen.
The wind was getting louder, heavy rain driving against the
helicopter.

Vernon nodded.
‘With all the commotion
going on in Thames House, we didn’t get time to pin anything down.
There are so many loose ends.’

‘
Brain feels like
jelly, right?
I felt the same way when I first came across all this
stuff.’
Gresnick pulled his cap down, until it was almost
concealing his eyes.
‘We need to have a good idea of what we’re
going up against or we won’t stand a chance.
Those Delta Force guys
out there hold all the cards.
They know exactly what’s going on,
and we’re just taking shots in the dark.’

It was only occurring to Vernon now how
out of his depth he was.
Going on active service wasn’t his thing.
His job was to provide agents in the field with the information
they needed.
Now, he was the person needing the hard information,
and there wasn’t any.

He noticed the pilot whispering to one
of the crew and strained to hear what they were saying.
It was hard
to make out over the sound of the engines and rotor blades, but he
thought the pilot said something about a ‘strange shape’ appearing
above the Chinook.
A flock of birds, maybe?

‘
Are you all right?’
Gresnick asked.

‘
Just thought I heard
the pilot mentioning a problem.’

‘
Night Stalker,
remember?
If he can’t handle it, no one can.’

Vernon smiled half-heartedly.

‘
The Cainite
Destiny
says the Nazis can trace their
lineage back to Cain,’ Gresnick said.
‘What do you know about
Cain?’

‘
He killed Abel.
He was
the first murderer in history.
God branded him and made him an
outcast.
He lived in the Land of Nod, East of Eden.
I seem to
remember he was a bit of a scientist and built a city.’

‘
An early Alchemist,
perhaps?’

‘
I suppose
so.’

‘
How do you think Cain
felt about God?’

‘
He hated him, I
guess.’

‘
Did he want
revenge?’

‘
Probably.’

‘
What do people who
want revenge normally do?’

Vernon tried to leap ahead to see where
this was leading.
An odd childhood memory came back to him.
He
remembered standing outside his parents’ room one night, with his
ear pressed against the door.
Moaning noises were coming from
inside.
No humans, he thought, could make such sounds.
Behind that
locked door, his parents must have transformed themselves into
their true shape – aliens of some kind.
He didn’t speak to them for
days afterwards.

He hesitated, not wanting to seem
stupid in front of Gresnick, but the words pounding in his mind
were pressing against his lips.
They insisted on forcing their way
out.
‘Perhaps Cain wanted to…’ He shook his head.
This was insane.
But Gresnick was staring at him, encouraging him to finish his
sentence.
Vernon had never been particularly religious, but nor was
he attracted to atheism.
The words now in his mind seemed like the
ultimate sacrilege.

‘
Perhaps he wanted to
what?’
Gresnick said.
‘
To strike
back
?’

Vernon bowed his head.
Beads of sweat
were erupting on his forehead.
His parents weren’t aliens, he
discovered all those years ago, just ordinary humans doing ordinary
human things.
But no ordinary humans could accomplish the
extraordinary thought that had now seized his mind and was refusing
to let go.

‘
Go on,’ Gresnick said.
‘You know exactly what this is all about.’

Vernon rushed out the words, as though
to say them quickly enough was to render them harmless.
‘I think
Cain might have wanted to kill God.’

Gresnick sat back.

‘
Precisely
.’

29

T
he convoy was
at a halt again.
They had passed through a village a little
earlier, but no lights were on.
Maybe there was a
blackout.

Lucy watched as Captain Kruger held a
conference with three of his soldiers, each taking a turn to use
the night vision binoculars.
It would be a miracle, she thought, if
they could see anything in this darkness even with the newest
technology.
There was no moon, no starlight.
Even though the
headlights of the Land Rovers were on, the beams seemed to break
into pieces and fall to the ground.
It was as though light itself
were beginning to die, its brightness fading, like everything else
in this dimming world.
No one would be able to follow them in these
conditions.
Their convoy would appear as nothing more than a faint
afterimage of something that passed here long ago.
These days it
was difficult to separate people from spectres.

Each time any of the soldiers got out
of a vehicle, they had to take a torch with them.
They seemed like
shadow-figures, ghosts stepping through a half-world where things
couldn’t take on full form.
Their flesh was unnaturally pale,
almost blue.

Kruger turned and pointed his torch at
Lucy.
He had one of those faces that seemed incapable of smiling.
God, she loathed him.
She thrust her hand inside her jacket and
traced the outline of her medicine bottle with her fingers.
Her
lips formed a sly smile.
It was so easy to fool Kruger – he didn’t
dare touch any sexual part of her body.
She wouldn’t stop taking
her medication just because he said so.
Without it, she would never
have survived the last few months.
Even now, her pills were the
only things keeping her calm.
It amazed her that everything that
had happened tonight hadn’t made her crack.
A few months ago, after
anything remotely as weird as this, she would have slumped into a
zombie state.
There, nothing could touch her.
She’d be beyond
caring, always the best place to be.
Her psychiatrist said she
deliberately put herself in that condition, that she was fleeing
from life.
Who in their right mind wouldn’t?
Life equalled pain.
It
was the only equation anyone needed to learn.

‘
I need to go to the,
uh…’ She waved her hand.

Her guard turned away in disgust.
‘Don’t go far,’ he said.

As Lucy opened the Land Rover’s door,
the freezing wind stung her skin.
She reached inside the vehicle,
grabbed a plastic water bottle and stuffed it into one of her
pockets.
Stumbling a few feet into the dark, she fumbled for her
torch’s on-switch then scanned around, looking for a private
spot.

Crouching down behind a
broken-down wall at the side of the road, she switched off her
torch so no one could see what she was doing.
She was relieved by
how noisy the wind was, drowning out the sound she was making.
When
she finished, she poured some bottled water over her hands to rinse
them.
While she zipped up her combats, she wondered if she should
try to get away after all.
But where would she go?
She didn’t have
a map, had no clear idea of where she was, and the weather was out
of Siberia.
She screwed the cap back on the bottle of water and
stuffed it into her pocket.
Whether she liked it or not, she was
stuck with Kruger.
She still had no clear sense of what his plans
were for her other than that they were taking her to
that
place.
Beyond that,
zilch.

For a moment, she wished she could
check her appearance in a mirror.
She never bothered in the
convent.
There were virtually no mirrors there anyway.
Would she
recognise herself?
They told her in the convent that she was
getting better.
She had such a long path to retrace.
Just weeks
ago, she was being pushed around the convent’s garden in a
wheelchair, dribbling, understanding nothing of who or where she
was.
The only reason she even knew about it was that she’d sneaked
a look at her doctor’s report.
Now, not only was she getting back
to her old self, but, in a strange way, accelerating past.
It was
as though there were someone else inside her, much more together
than she ever was.
She imagined herself like some human snake,
sloughing off its old skin.
Was there such a thing as a recovery
that left you healthier than you were before you fell ill?

Sinclair called her
name.
For a moment, it freaked her out.
Lucy
.
Somehow, that simple label made
her concrete again; proved that she truly existed in this world
outside the walls of the convent.

Clambering over the small wall, she
flashed her torch at Sinclair.

‘
There you are,’ he
said.
‘You shouldn’t wander off like that.’

‘
What do these soldiers
want with me?
You have to tell me.’
It was so cold that she
imagined icicles were growing inside her nose.
She stuffed her left
hand deep into one of her pockets, and wished she had thick gloves.
Every few seconds, she had to switch the torch from one hand to the
other to stop her hands freezing.

Sinclair scanned around.
His face
dipped in and out of shadows.
He was wearing a large parka too and
slapping his hands together to keep warm.

‘
Don’t trust these
men.’
He glanced at the soldiers sitting inside the Land
Rovers.

‘
Are they going to kill
me?’

Sinclair bowed his head.
In the
torchlight, his features were harsh and angular.
His grey eyes
caught the light in a way that made them look unearthly.

Lucy gazed at the ground and saw smears
of blood.
A wheel of one of the Land Rovers had crushed a rabbit.
Its entrails were hanging out and one of its eyes was mangled.

‘
I didn’t want to tell
you,’ Sinclair said.
‘The late Pope…I confess I had concerns.
Julius IV was…’

‘
You think he was a
heretic, don’t you?’